Azure Kubernetes Service: Kubernetes 1.34 end of life

After the end of life date, community support for Kubernetes 1.34 ends. Clusters not enrolled in long-term support enter platform support.

• Platform support covers AKS and Azure platform issues only, not Kubernetes functionality and components. New clusters cannot be created during the platform support period.
• There is a 60-day platform support grace period after the published end of life date to upgrade to a supported minor version. For the initial rollout, the grace period is the window through May 31, 2027.
• After the grace period, the cluster is eligible for a platform-initiated upgrade to the lowest supported community minor version. No such upgrade starts before June 1, 2027. Platform-initiated upgrades apply to AKS in the Azure public cloud; availability in Azure Government and Azure operated by 21Vianet is announced separately.
• A platform-initiated upgrade does not follow the maintenance window, does not stop for deprecated API usage and can override a Pod Disruption Budget. Its month in the release calendar is a planning estimate, not an exact date.
• Regional version removal can happen at a different time from the published date.

1. List the versions AKS offers for the cluster with az aks get-upgrades --resource-group <resource-group-name> --name <cluster-name> --output table.
2. While the cluster is a supported non-LTS cluster, upgrade one minor version at a time. Minor versions cannot be skipped.
3. Upgrade the control plane and all node pools with az aks upgrade, as described in Upgrade an AKS cluster control plane.
4. If the cluster is already on an unsupported version, use the oldest supported GA target that AKS offers and perform a full-cluster upgrade. Control-plane-only upgrades are not supported for this path. The version-skipping table in Supported Kubernetes versions in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) labels this an unsupported recovery path: AKS allows the upgrade to proceed, but it is not supported and might carry risks. The platform support table on the same page lists upgrades from an N-3 version to a supported version as supported.
5. If no target is available for an unsupported cluster, create a new cluster with a supported version and migrate the workloads.
6. To get extended support for the version instead, enable long-term support. This requires moving the cluster to the Premium tier and explicitly selecting the LTS support plan. Microsoft-managed Calico is not supported in LTS. Once community support for the version has ended, LTS cannot be disabled for that version.